> This is naive. Testing doesn't guarantee anything. If this is what you > think about testing, then testing gives you a false impression of > security. Maybe we should drop testing.
Typechecking is done by a reduced lamda calculus (System F, which is ML-Style), whereas testing has the full power of a turing complete language. So _if_ one has to be dropped, it would certainly be typechecking. Additionally, testing gives you the added benefit of actually using your decelared APIs - which serves documentation purposes as well as securing your design decisions, as you might discover bad design while actually writing testcases. Besides that, the false warm feeling of security a successful compilation run has given many developers made them check untested and actually broken code into the VCS. I've seen that _very_ often! And the _only_ thinng that prevents us from doing so is to enforce tests. But these are more naturally done in python (or similar languages) as every programmer knows "unless the program run sucsessfully, I can't say anything about it" than in a statically typed language where the programmer argues "hey, it compiled, it should work!" Regards, Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
